Brock reached for his coffee, then slid it away, feeling nauseous. It was as if his own doubts had found a voice in this woman, stern and unequivocal, and he felt obliged to challenge them. ‘Did you part on bad terms from your ex-husband, Ms Lewis?’ he asked, the words sounding pompous as he spoke them.
‘You mean, am I prejudiced? Of course, we all are. But no, we didn’t part on bad terms, not really. We just reached a point where I realised I had to leave him. You might say I left for professional reasons as much as personal ones, although the two were so mixed together. As we became more successful, I began to realise that we were after quite different things. For me, a good reputation was a means to being able to do good work, whereas for him the opposite was true-the quality of our work was a means to attract publicity and success. He was fanatical about publicity; I couldn’t understand it. He’d lose sleep fuming over some mildly critical comment in a review of one of our buildings, while I’d be lying awake trying to work out how to detail a window. And as the projects got bigger and the clients more prestigious, the differences in what we wanted became more difficult to reconcile. His ambition was like a steamroller, and in the end I decided I had to step out of the way or be squashed. He felt terribly betrayed, of course, the way he did if one of his bright young designers decided to quit. It was an affront to his ego.’
‘You make him sound insecure.’
‘Does that surprise you? I suppose people have told you that he was so full of self-confidence, and that was true. He loved being with people, and drew energy and confidence from them, but on his own, in the middle of the night, he was as insecure as the rest of us-worse.’ She nodded to herself, recalling something. ‘I remember once, it was in New York, we went to an opening at a little gallery in SoHo. There was an exhibition of photorealist paintings, and one of them was a huge watercolour, about eight feet by five, of a hermit crab. It was a stunning image, of this soft little crawling thing pinned beneath an enormous florid shell, like a building it was dragging around on its back. Charles seemed mesmerised by it. Later I offered to buy it for him, but he was horrified at the idea, and eventually confessed that he saw himself as that little crab, forced to live inside the wrong body.’
‘The wrong body?’ Brock remembered the underlined passage about the criminals’ heads in Verge’s office. ‘What did he mean by that?’
‘I think he meant that he’d spent his whole life trying to be someone else, the person that his mother wanted him to be, maybe-his father the Olympian.’
The reference to the painting reminded Brock of something else, and he said, ‘You were acquainted with a number of painters were you? I’m thinking of a Spanish artist, Luz Diaz, who bought the house you and Charles designed for his mother.’
‘Briar Hill. Yes, I heard she was living there, but I’ve never met her. Charlotte told me about her in one of our conversations-we maintain a rather distant mother- daughter relationship by phone. She was always her father’s daughter, and was very angry when I left Charles. I used to think…’
She stopped in mid-sentence, a startled look dawning on her face. ‘I’m being very slow, aren’t I? If you think it possible that Charles is still alive, that Sandy didn’t kill him, then you also think that Charles may have staged Sandy’s suicide-that he’s here, in this country.’ Her surprise turned to alarm. ‘You think he’s come back?’
‘We haven’t got anywhere near thinking that, Ms Lewis,’ Brock said. ‘As I said at the beginning, I’m just trying to cover every angle, for my own satisfaction. As far as the authorities are concerned, there’s absolutely no doubt that your former husband is dead.’
But Gail Lewis wasn’t reassured. As she reached forward for her pencil Brock saw a tremor in her hand. She fiercely clicked the lead.
‘In any event,’ he added, ‘you’ve surely got nothing to be worried about.’
‘You don’t think so? Chief Inspector, if Charles has been crazy enough to slaughter his wife in May, and then come back to kill Sandy now, I don’t think anyone connected with him can feel safe!’
Brock sipped his coffee thoughtfully, then said, ‘You were talking just now about too much data. One of the problems in my line of work is false data, people who tell us lies. You lied to my sergeant, didn’t you, Ms Lewis? You told her you hadn’t seen Charles Verge in eight years.’
She looked startled, then guilty, her face turning pink. ‘How did you…? Yes, you’re right, I did lie. I felt bad about it afterwards, but I just wanted to get back to my meeting, and there was no point… I thought there was no point.’
‘Tell me.’
The woman sighed, shaking her head. ‘I bumped into Charles one evening about a year ago, at the opening of an exhibition. He was at his most charming, the champagne was flowing, and he suggested we have dinner together, for old time’s sake. God knows why, but I agreed. He was a little drunk, and a little tired, and during the course of the meal he came out with all this stuff. His marriage was finished, Miki was a nightmare, Sandy was a shit, the partnership was doomed. The thing was, he was laughing all the time he said it, as if he was describing some ridiculous comedy he’d seen at the movies. He was quite witty, almost boasting about his disasters, and I laughed along with him. He said that he’d like to wipe the slate clean, do away with them all, and start afresh.’
‘He said that, that he wanted to do away with them all?’
‘Yes, something like that. I didn’t think it meant anything, and forgot about it until Miki’s murder. Then I decided I didn’t want to remember what he’d said that evening. I didn’t want anything more to do with the story of Charles Verge. Then I read that it was Sandy who had killed Miki and Charles. But if you’re saying now that Charles may have engineered the whole thing…’
‘All the same, you’re surely not in any danger.’
‘Aren’t I? I was one of the people who let him down, perhaps the most, in his eyes. And I remember something else he said that evening, when he dropped me off and said goodbye. He said that in a year’s time we might meet up again, and I should remember what he’d said.’
There was no panic in her eyes, but certainly there was fear.
‘But surely,’ Brock felt himself being dragged into confidences that he didn’t really want to share, ‘in the unlikely event that Charles did kill Sandy Clarke, his purpose was much more deliberate than just getting even?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘The death of Sandy Clarke cleared Charles Verge’s name, re-established his reputation.’
‘His reputation…’ She thought about that, sipping absently at her coffee. ‘Yes, you’re right.’
And yet, Brock thought, that wasn’t quite the whole story. Like Gail, he felt as if his thinking had been slow, unwilling to pursue the implications of a scenario he didn’t want to believe. But if Verge, officially cleared and dead, was still alive, any program of vengeance would be open to him. He thought again of the suicide note on Clarke’s computer. Whoever had written it had known that Clarke was the father of Charlotte’s child. Did that betrayal precipitate Clarke’s death, and did it now put Charlotte herself at risk? Who else?
‘I mean, he was a rational man, yes? Not unstable.’ He tried to make it sound like a positive statement, rather than a plea.
Gail drew the shape of a cone on her pad, frowning. ‘He had mood swings… periods of depression. I don’t think they were properly diagnosed then. Charlotte said he had one for a year after I left. Maybe he’s had better help since then.’
Or none at all, Brock thought, and watched her add a small creature peering out from under the bottom edge of the conical shape, legs and eyes and one lopsided claw.
She looked up suddenly and said, ‘It’s funny you mentioning that Spanish woman just now, the artist. Charlotte told me about her buying Briar Hill at the time that Charles was buying the cottage nearby for her, and I thought it was an odd coincidence. Knowing that Charles and Miki’s marriage was rocky, I wondered if there might be something going on between Charles and this other woman, almost as if he were establishing an alternative happy little family down in Bucks. Then there was Miki’s murder, and Charles disappeared, and another thought came to me. In retrospect, it was almost as if Charles had set about taking care of everything before the tragedy happened-getting Charlotte settled, and establishing the Spanish woman nearby, like a kind of chaperone or proxy parent.’